Raines looked at us and at the paper. Cole never moved.

“There’s four of them,” Tilda said. “They have guns.”

Raines’s mouth trembled very slightly, and I thought he was going to say something. But instead, he clamped his jaw, took out a pen, and signed the sheet. Cole picked it up, looked at the signature, waved it a minute to dry the ink, then folded it and put it inside his shirt. With no change of expression, he nodded toward the door and I went out. The bar was to the right of the lobby. You could enter it from the lobby, but most people went in through the street entrance on the opposite side. It was the kind of thing I’d learned to notice without even thinking about it. Always know where you are, Cole used to say.

I went straight through the lobby to the street, and turned right and walked to the corner and went in through the swinging mahogany doors of the saloon. The late-afternoon sun, slanting through the doorway, made the smoky air look sort of blue. I let the doors swing shut behind me and moved to the left of the door while my eyes adjusted.

The center of the room had cleared, tables had been pushed aside, and most of the people in the saloon were standing against the walls. Four men, all wearing guns, were drinking whiskey at the bar. Behind the bar, the strapping, red-faced bartender stood stiffly, not looking at anything. There was a big, brass spittoon in the center of the cleared space, and two of the men at the bar were trying to piss in it from that distance. Neither was having much success. Cole came into the saloon through the lobby door, and watched for a moment.

“Button them up,” he said in his light, clear voice.

One of the men faltered in his stream and looked at Cole.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said.

“Virgil Cole.”

“Virgil Cole? No shit? Hey, Chalk,” he said to his partner in piss. “Virgil Cole wants us to stop.”